Call for papers: Music-making in Australia

Transnational and Transcultural Exchange

A Special Issue of Journal of Musicological Research

Abstract Deadline: 1 October 2024

Edited by Rachel Orzech, John Gabriel, and Paul Watt

Transnational and transcultural exchange have long attracted scholarly investigation, but how to frame and analyse such contact has proved an ongoing challenge. Recently, the idea of 'global music history' has attracted music scholars as a new framework to explore the complex issues surrounding cultural contact, exchange, and entanglement from a decentred, non-hierarchical perspective, but it has also attracted criticism for reviving the problematic legacy of comparative musicology and appropriating approaches long used outside the Anglosphere.

This special-issue journal welcomes proposals of previously unpublished material that ask what research on Australian music and musicians can contribute to these discussions. For instance:
 

• How do Australia's histories of European settlement, racial nationalism, restrictive immigration, forced labour, and multiculturalism expand existing narratives of music, race, migration, and diaspora in other settler-colonial societies, especially the United States and Canada?
   
• How does music's role in relations between Australia's First Peoples and their Southeast Asian and Pacific neighbours contribute to explorations of global networks not centred on or driven by the West?
   
• How has the growth and development of musical life in Australia been fostered or impeded by its status as a British colony and/or a belief in British/European cultural authority, particularly in relation to notions of insularity, progress and parochialism?
   
• What can Australia's position as a British colony that itself engaged in colonialism in Southeast Asia and the Pacific tell us about music and colonialism?
   
• How does Australia's some-time self-image as an Anglo-Western society located in geographic networks of Southeast Asia and the Indian and South Pacific Oceans disrupt narratives of Western and non-Western cultural contact that centre the West on Europe and North America? How does it disrupt the very concept of 'Western music'?
   
• What styles, idioms or genres of music have arisen from transnational and transcultural exchange?

New scholarship that explores new and emerging concepts and frames of thinking relating to Indigenous music, female participation, popular music, minority groups, and interdisciplinary research are especially welcomed.

Abstracts of 350 words, due by 1 October 2024, should be emailed to

Paul Watt, paul.watt@adelaide.edu.au

Or

Rachel Orzech, orzechr@unimelb.edu.au